Home Is Where the Haunt Is
by neoxphile
Summary: At the end of October in 2012, Mulder and Scully are asked to investigate a supposedly haunted historical village, which they reluctantly agree to. The tattered remains of Hurricane Sandy complicates what should be a an open and shut case. (This is a sequel to Home for the Holidays)


Title: Home Is Where the Haunt Is  
Author: Neoxphile  
Category: A

Summary: At the end of October in 2012, Mulder and Scully are asked to investigate a supposedly haunted historical village, which they reluctantly agree to. The tattered remains of Hurricane Sandy complicate what should be an open and shut case.

Author's note: this is a sequel to Home for the Holidays, and is set almost three years later. It is also the second story in what is anticipated to eventually be a trilogy.

* * *

October 30, 2012  
En Route North

Though the hurricane was officially over, the landscape through the mid-Atlantic states was still bleak. What looked like kindling was scattered for miles in the breakdown lane, and many trees that hadn't shattered amidst the weather's unforgiving onslaught had bent. Scully felt especially bad for the birch trees, half of which were bent nearly to the ground at painful angles. She glanced at Mulder as he drove, wondering what he was thinking about. She was fairly certain it wasn't the trees, or her wish that they'd remained at home in Virginia.

Remaining at home hadn't been an option, though, but part of her wished that they'd taken Kyrie up on the offer to babysit her siblings instead of bringing the kids with them. _This isn't a dangerous case_ , she reminded herself, for about the fifth time since they'd packed up their SUV and began the trek north.

In the rear seat two-and-a-half-year-old Tate Mulder's blue eyes widened in alarm as a branch flew past the car's window, and Scully wasn't surprised to see her youngest son slipping his pacifier into his mouth.

Part of her wanted to reassure the toddler that things were fine, but she knew her littlest one well enough to know that he'd be more worried if she tried to tell him that there was nothing to worry about than if she left it alone... he was a lot like his father that way, she thought, glancing at Mulder.

Mulder gripped the steering wheel a little too tightly, reminding her that she wasn't the only one who had misgivings about getting involved with this FBI case.

"Look Tate!" Aspen said excitedly from the middle of the seat, a chubby finger pointing out a different window of the SUV. "Look in the tree!"

Scully followed where the girl pointed and noticed the thing that had captured her daughter's attention immediately: perhaps there had been an ill-fated birthday party planned for the day before, but a cluster of blue and gold mylar balloons shaped like stars were caught up in the broken limbs of a tree, and as they turned they caught the light.

"Neat," Nathaniel offered from the booster seat next to his sister. "How'd they get there, Mom?"

"I guess they blew up there," Scully told him, unable to tear her eyes away from the bedraggled balloons. The people who'd put them out had probably expected them to stay put, not be cast up into the limbs of a tree. Part of her worried that this was only one of the indignities that anonymous family had suffered earlier in the week-

"Maybe it was aliens," William commented dryly from the backseat, derailing her train of thought.

"Probably not," Mulder corrected automatically. "Aliens don't have time for frivolity."

"Friv-?" Aspen asked, face clearly confused.

"He means fun," Kyrie said as she closed the cover of her kindle. Unlike the three little ones, she and William had been amusing themselves on the long drive by reading. Their younger siblings couldn't read yet, which wasn't too surprising because Nathaniel had only gotten two months of kindergarten under his belt yet, and he was older than Aspen.

"Daddy!" Aspen sounded as exasperated as only a teased four-year-old can. "Why didn't you say fun?"

"Because I'm trying to enrich your vocabulary."

"We're getting money?" Nathaniel asked hopefully, which was met with a puzzled silence before a light bulb went off over Mulder's head.

"Your riches are getting smarter, buddy," Mulder told him loftily.

"Oh," Nathaniel sounded disappointed. "I wanted to go on a treasure hunt."

Sitting in the front passenger seat, Scully had to bite her tongue - only she, Mulder, and Kyrie knew it, but they _were_ in fact on a treasure hunt of a sort. But instead of gold doubloons, they were looking for knowledge.

Truly, the only reason they had agreed to take part in not only this case, but the last two earlier in the last summer and fall as well, was their perhaps naive hope that showing a willingness to help the FBI might help them too. Over the last nearly three years they had managed to find exactly zero clues about the whereabouts of their two still-missing children, and they were rapidly running out of straws to grasp.

Indeed, in truth they didn't even know if the two children were even alive, or if they were Mulder's biological offspring too. There was no evidence either way but for the moment they chose to take it on faith that they both were...much as they did that they were alive.

"I don't know, Nate," William said, "Maybe we'll have a treasure hunt after all."

"Yeah?" Nathaniel asked, tone wary. He'd been the butt of too many jokes his brother had made not to be.

For once, though, the preteen wasn't teasing him. "It's a historic village. If Mom and Dad don't have time to make us a list for a scavenger hunt we could find all the stuff in the brochures."

Nathaniel smiled at this idea but Aspen looked confused. "What's hiss...historic?" she asked, giving William an expectant look.

"Old," William supplied.

"History is the things that happened a long time ago that were important enough for people to still learn about," Mulder explained without taking his eyes off the road. "So something historic is from back then."

"Oh."

This answer seemed to satisfy the little girl, but Nathaniel asked, "What important thing happened there?"

Mulder cut his eyes towards his wife, clearly under the opinion that she'd be more adept at providing a G-rated explanation than he would be. Scully agreed, though she suspected that his story would be more fun.

"Well," Scully began, "Once upon a time there was a logging town in Maine called Jessup-"

"I thought we were going to New Jersey," William interrupted. "We are **really** far from Maine."

"We're going to New Jersey," Mulder reminded him.

"But-"

"Are you going to let me tell this story or not?" Scully demanded to know.

"Yes..."

"As I was saying, there was once a town in Maine where they made their living through the logging industry."

"They were lumberjacks?" Nathaniel asked.

"Yes."

"How come he gets to ask questions without getting yelled at?" William complained.

Mulder glared at the rear view mirror. "Your mother didn't yell at you."

"And he wasn't asking a question to be obnoxious," Scully added.

"I'm obnoxious?!"

"You have your moments," Kyrie told him.

William looked wounded. "Sometimes you all suck."

"What'd I do?" Aspen asked, staring at her older brother.

"Can we just let Dana finish the story?" Kyrie asked irritability.

William frowned at her, but both Nathaniel and Aspen mimed zipping their lips. Tate, of course, said nothing.

Telling herself not to sigh, Scully went on as if her children hadn't just derailed her for the second time. "You wouldn't know it from looking at pictures now since it has been long enough for the forests to recover, but in the second half of the 1800s they managed to cut down most of the trees in the upper northeast. They call this deforestation."

She took a sip of water before going on. "Jessup was no exception. Once the biggest source of income dried up, the town began to die."

Aspen's eyes widened. "All the people died?"

"No, sweetheart. The people were okay but they had to move some place else where they could make enough money for clothes and to feed themselves."

"They all went away?"

"Yes. By 1869 no one lived in Jessup anymore. It turned into a ghost town."

Nathaniel looked astonished. "The town was for ghosts?"

"No. That's just a figure of speech."

"Actually-" Mulder began but he shut up when Scully gave him a sharp look.

"Mulder!" she hissed. Once she was sure that he wasn't going to say anything to scare the little ones, she went on to explain, "They call a place that has been completely abandoned, leaving just empty buildings a ghost town."

"But they know what happened to everyone," William said sounding distinctly disappointed.

"Well..."

"I thought that it was going to be more like Roanoke. But there's no mystery."

"We know about Roanoke because what happened was so strange," Kyrie told him. "If entire town's worth of people disappeared on a regular basis it wouldn't be noteworthy."

"Still," he grumbled.

Mulder spoke up then. "It's no Roanoke but Jessup isn't without intrigue. We know what happened to all but the last twenty-seven former residents."

"Yeah?" The boy perked up at this bit of information.

"Yeah," his father answered. "The town was abandoned over a long period, about five years. For the last eighteen months those last twenty-seven people seemed determined to stay. The last anyone saw of them was right after the Christmas of 1868. The weather turned mean right after that and no one could visit until it stopped snowing the following April."

"And no one was there?" William asked.

"Exactly."

"What did historians think happened?" Scully asked. This wasn't something they'd discussed but she was willing to bet some of his late nights over the past couple of weeks were due to researching just that question.

He shrugged which looked extremely inelegant given that neither of his hands ever left the steering wheel. "Oh, you know. They figure some starved and that others took their chances getting local Native American tribes to take them in."

"In 1868?" Kyrie asked, sounding as skeptical as her stepmother usually did. "How many were left by that point?"

"Not many, he said, nodding in approval, "A lot historians had that same doubt," he added. "There weren't many tribes left in New England by that point, you're right."

"A lot of historians?" Scully repeated.

He smirked. "Okay, I wouldn't say that _a lot_ of people have ever investigated what happened to Jessup, Maine, but of those who did, a lot had that wonder. It is an intriguing mystery, but unfortunately, it really isn't one that was ever given a hell of a lot of attention."

A scolding voice from the backseat said "Daddy! You said a naughty word."

"Sorry, Aspen," Mulder said, sounding at least a little apologetic.

"Are you sorry you accidentally taught her to narc on you?" William asked, sniggering.

"A little," his father admitted.

"Mulder!"

"What did the people who went to look for them think happened?" Kyrie asked, the only person in the car who was apparently interested in being reasonable. "Their families, I mean. Those people who couldn't go in during the winter and look in on them."

Pulling up at a red light, Mulder shrugged again. "I don't know, Kyrie. They weren't particularly wealthy people, so no one really cared enough to record their opinions or concerns. Kind of tragic, if you ask me."

Beside him, Scully realized that he was probably thinking about Samantha. No one outside his immediate family had really concern themselves with what it happened to her, either, at least not beyond thinking it was sad that a small girl had gone missing in the middle of the night. In some ways that was galling, but in others, understandable. People have their own concerns, their own families to worry about, after all.

Sometimes, not that she ever admitted it to him, she wondered what her own parents would've thought they had been residents of the same city at the time of his sister's disappearance. Somehow, she didn't think that her parents would've been overly concerned about someone else's children, either. At least not unless they thought there was a continuing threat, one that might endanger her, or her siblings.

It was strange how little people knew their neighbors, at least these days. Glancing in the rear view mirror, she caught sight of Kyrie, who is still attentively looking at her father, waiting for him to continue. Perhaps, she reconsidered, it wasn't just these days. No one had ever reported young Kyrie missing after her mother's murder. No one had seemed to notice that the small girl had also disappeared, and although she wasn't murdered like Samantha, her circumstances had been far from ideal, either.

Modern age seemed practically designed with the secrecy of serial killers in mind, Scully thought darkly. With the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and women no longer staying home as a matter of routine, people just didn't know each other very well anymore. You might wave at a neighbor passing, perhaps even comment on the weather or ask how they were, but gone were the days when people primarily socialized within their neighborhoods. It was possible to live next door to someone not know much about them beyond their name, their general age, and maybe, just maybe what they did for a living.

"Mom, what are you thinking about?" William asked, ever the perceptive one. "You sure have a funny look on your face."

"Maybe she thinks the dad's been feeding us a bunch of bull," Kyrie suggested wryly.

"No, I don't think that's mom's 'dad's full of it' look," William commented.

Scully shrugged. "I was just thinking about how we don't really know our neighbors these days."

As soon as she said it, she thought about how far their house was from the neighbors. It had been this simple fact that had nearly cost Aspen her life as an infant. No one had noticed a year-old baby outside, slowly freezing to death. As it was, she was wildly lucky to have gotten away with just losing a single toe.

Perhaps something in her expression showed her train of thought, because she could see in the rear mirror that Kyrie had shivered. Of all of them, Kyrie had taken it the hardest when Aspen had been injured, herself and Mulder aside, of course. The then-teenager had done everything she possibly could to protect her younger brothers, but this little sister she hadn't even known existed, or at least hadn't known the identity of, had gotten hurt anyway. She, Mulder, Kyrie, and William had all had some family counseling not long after that, and she thought it did them all some good. Most of all, she hoped that Kyrie had really let go of the guilt to the degree that she seemed to have. She may not have though, because Scully hadn't herself. Not really.

"So," William said, beginning the process of dragging them back to the conversation they had initiated several minutes before. "Why are we going to New Jersey if this ghost town is in Maine?" he asked, which was a fairly reasonable question.

"It's not in Maine anymore," Mulder said matter-of-factly, as if that cleared everything up.

"How do you move a city?" William demanded to know.

"Not a city, a town," his father corrected automatically. "A small town."

"Still!"

"You must've heard that it one point wealthy people, and I'm talking about really wealthy people, manage to move a few European castles to the United States," Mulder said, as if this was something that people discussed every single day. "What they would do is carefully number every single brick, ship them over here, and then, begin the painstaking process of reconstructing the whole damn thing-"

"Daddy!" came a predictably affronted squawk.

Mulder ignored his younger daughter, and went on. "A town is trivial in comparison."

It was William's turned to look skeptical. "So they just moved it? Several states?"

"Yup."

"The whole thing?"

"Yup," his father repeated.

"What the hell for?" the boy asked.

"Will!"

"Aspen, enough," Scully said, turning to the smaller children in the back seat. "No more tattling."

"But mommy-" Aspen began, and when that didn't soften her mother's look, simply settled for pouting. It was all Scully could do not to snort when she noticed how much this scowl made the little girl look like her father, and not just because she shared his eye and hair colors.

"What for?" Mulder asked rhetorically.

William, however, didn't take it as a rhetorical question. "Yeah?"

"To make money, of course."

"How do you make money relocating a town?" Kyrie asked, much to Scully's surprise. Somehow, she thought that at least their oldest would instinctively understand what was trying to be accomplished. Perhaps the book she was reading was too engrossing for her to have given the conversation more than her cursory thought.

"You advertise heavily, and con people into coming to see a historical village. Surely you have heard of Sturbridge Village, or at least Plymouth plantation?" he asked, as if he had some doubt about this.

"Obviously," she said, sighing.

"Well, they thought that a ghost town would be a moneymaker too."

"And has it been?" Kyrie asked, not sounding like she knew the answer to Scully's further surprise. Hadn't she paid attention when they'd explained the case to her privately? Tilting her head, Scully wondered if the only thing that had sunk in was their desire to cooperate with the FBI in hopes of gaining some help in return.

"Not at all," Mulder replied.

"And they're spending more money to get you to come look at it?" she asked, apparently not including herself or her siblings as important enough to warrant a mention as part of the investigative team.

"They're hoping that they can still make some money out of this," Scully told her, jumping in before Mulder could give some sort of outlandish explanation.

"And it's not just us," Mulder reminded Kyrie. "Meridian Pierce will be there too."

"I thought you were joking when you said that," Kyrie mumbled.

"Not at all," Mulder repeated. "They've invited us and the renowned ghost hunter both."

William gave the back of his father's head an interested look. "So...they're looking for a reason that the place is failing one way or the other, huh?"

"Exactly." Mulder sounded pleased with his oldest son. "They're hoping that your mom and I come up with a scientific explanation for everything that has been going on, or that Peirce can prove it's haunted."

"Does it have to be one or the other?" Kyrie wanted to know. "It could just be a Scooby Doo plot here, you know. People could easily fake a haunting too."

"Why would they?" William asked her.

His sister shrugged. "Maybe some townies really don't want the attraction to open. It wouldn't be the first time. I mean, think about how many times folks in towns have kept stores from opening, you know?"

"They don't want the traffic?" he guessed.

"Or the noise, or tourists cluttering things up, or-"

"Or if they can scare people off, they can buy the land cheap and sell it to a developer?"

"Which episode of Scooby Doo is that from?"

"I don't know, like a quarter of them."

"Wait…" Nathaniel said in a small voice. "There are ghosts?"

"No," Scully said.

"Maybe," Mulder said.

Kyrie reached for the little boy's hand and gave it a squeeze. "Even if there _are_ ghosts, it'll be fine."

"But Daddy said he's a ghost hunter. That makes the ghosts sound mean. Like those lions that ate people," Nathaniel protested, looking anything but reassured.

"You just had to watch **The Ghost and The Darkness** last week, didn't you," Scully complained to Mulder in a low tone. He shrugged.

"The guy isn't literally hunting ghosts, Nate," William told him. "He's 'hunting' like looking for them. You know, like an Easter egg hunt."

"Oh…" Nathaniel sighed. "That's different."

Scully was pleased that he apparently found William's explanation comforting. She would have liked to have told her little boy that there was nothing to worry about because there was no such thing as ghosts, but as soon as she could get the words out of her mouth, Mulder would remind her of a Christmas years ago in a supposedly haunted house. And she still had no good explanation for what had made them imagine the otherworldly encounter…there was no convenient fungus or drugging to make sense of it all.

Aspen, apparently tired of the conversation, called to Scully. "Mommy, when do we get there?"

"About an hour, sweetie."

"Oh." The tiny brunette thought this over for a minute. "Can we play I Spy?"

"Sure."

"Count me out," William groaned. "I'm going back to my book."

"Because you never win," Kyrie teased him. "Even playing against little kids like Aspen and Nathaniel."

"I'm not that little," Nathaniel objected.

"I could win if I wanted to," William muttered before opening his kindle again.

Kyrie joined Aspen, Mulder, and Nathaniel in the game, but Scully was as quiet as her oldest son had grown. She stared out the window, wondering if there was anything to be gained, really. They wouldn't find any answers on this trip, and she wondered if Mulder's insistence that they trying to curry favor with the FBI and gain access to resources private citizens couldn't was their only option was true.

Surely there had to be another, more direct way to gain information about the two missing children?

 _If there is, why haven't we thought of it yet?_ she asked herself, leaning her head against the cold passenger side window.


End file.
